This week, I received an email from reader Lisa Templin-Rayborn offering additional details about the car’s infamous plastic bubble top (which was not in place the day Kennedy was shot.) She wrote: “I thought I would provide some additional information to you regarding the ‘bubble’ of President Kennedy’s limousine. The company out of Cincinnati subcontracted the plastic bubble to a company based in Salem, Ohio called Kenmuir Plastics, a Northeast Ohio company, which was owned by Lester ‘Pete’ Kenmuir. The bubble was vacuum-formed by Pete and Richard ‘Dick’ James, best friends and residents of Lisbon, Ohio. It’s just a little piece of information that adds more detail to your research. I know this because my dad was Dick James.”

According to Matt Anderson, curator of transportation for The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan: “The company still operates in Salem today under the name Ventra Salem Plastics. As the article indicates, Salem Plastics is not identified in any of the Lincoln press material, but that’s not unusual for a subcontractor.”

Got any tips of your own related to the JFK limo’s history? You can email me at cwynn@dallasnews.com.

Updated at 11: 59 a.m.:The Sixth Floor Museum today announced the donation of nearly 2,000 archival photos from The Dallas Morning News depicting the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The collection was officially handed over Friday, the eve of the 51st anniversary of the assassination, in a ceremonial donation. It includes 1,500 negatives and nearly 500 black and white print photographs, some never before made available to the public.

Nicola Longford, the museum’s executive director, said the museum’s first charge is to catalog and digitize the photos, which will eventually be available for public viewing online.

“This will forever be a significant resource for future generations, and we are very thankful,” Longford said.

She also praised the newspaper for its role in commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination last year.

The donation comes two days after the museum announced the addition of two other Kennedy-related collections, one from former Dallas Times Herald photographer Eamon Kennedy and the other from Fort Worth Press photographer Gene Gordon.

Original post by Bruce Tomaso: The Dallas Morning News is donating to The Sixth Floor Museum 2,000 photographs from the newspaper’s coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 visit to Dallas and its aftermath.

The donation of the photo archive — about 1,500 negatives and nearly 500 black-and-white prints — will be announced later this morning in a ceremony at the museum.

Some of the photos have never been seen by the public.

The donation is being made “in the interest of preserving the history and legacy of President John F. Kennedy,” the museum said in a news release. The gift coincides with the 51st anniversary, on Saturday, of JFK’s assassination.

The museum, at 411 Elm Streeet, is in the former Texas School Book Depository, the building from which Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza.

The bone-chilling weather undoubtedly kept many people at home, but Austin-based radio personality Alex Jones would not be deterred.

Talk show host Alex Jones walked up and down Main Street on Friday.

Jones, a hero to his anti-government listeners, was broadcasting live from downtown Dallas on Friday. And it was quite a show.

It began with a demonstration in Belo Garden Park across from the Earle Cabell Federal Building. And it ended with Jones and his followers being shoved across Main Street in the cold rain by Dallas County sheriff’s deputies who decided they’d had enough.

The crowd dispersed shortly after the confrontation, which did not lead to any serious injuries or arrests. It was around 2 p.m.

The rowdy Jones crowd drowned out the handful of quiet demonstrators and conspiracy theorists who set up along Main Street to get their message out. They included Mel Barney, 85, of Farmers Branch, who was selling his $15 book about Jack Ruby.

Shortly before 11 a.m., about a hundred supporters, mostly twenty-something men, gathered around Jones in Belo Garden. He invited them to line up and say something into his microphone.

Corey Collins, 25, was dressed in garb from the Revolutionary War era — a tri-cornered hat, knickers and stockings, a white shirt with lace cuffs.

“I’m here to protest the city not letting us pass out leaflets wherever we want,” he said. “It’s weird. I don’t understand it.”

Another Jones follower, a tall man, held a plastic ventriloquist’s dummy in his arms. He and his dummy joined in when the crowd began chantingm “Stop the Lies!”

Jones and Co. marched down Main Street toward Dealey Plaza. He kept broadcasting the whole way, followed closely by his personal cameraman who recorded every movement and word.

Word spread through the crowd that Jones intended to bust through the barricades that separated him and his group from the officially sanctioned audience at the JFK commemoration ceremony.

But Jones stopped at the barricade, apparently deciding that he didn’t want to get arrested.

“Don’t use the bullhorn,” he told a friend, as the audio from Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings’ speech poured from loudspeakers. “They might arrest you.”

Jones and his troupe then turned and marched back up Main Street, with no apparent destination. As they passed the intersection of Main and Market streets, the Coalition on Political Assassinations [COPA] was holding a demonstration in a parking lot.

John Judge, COPA’s executive director, explained to about 50 listeners that the city had cordoned off the area around the Dallas County Courthouse complex and refused to let demonstrators carry signs or march there.

“There is no free speech in the zone they’ve created,” he said.

Judge and his colleagues subscribe to various conspiracy theories about who killed JFK, and why. They wore yellow T-shirts featuring a JFK half dollar with a hole in its head and blood dripping onto its ear.

As 12:30 p.m. arrived — the moment when JFK was shot on Nov. 22, 1963 — Judge and his group paused for a moment of silence. In the background, the U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club sang “America the Beautiful.”

Judge could not let the moment pass without comment.

“They are not out for a moment of silence,” he said of those gathered at the official ceremony. “They want perpetual silence.”

Lee Harvey Oswald checked this book out, and it's about 50 years overdue.

After the assassination of JFK, the FBI asked Lillian Bradshaw, library director for the city of Dallas, for records of Lee Harvey Oswald’s transactions at the library. The search took months, according to a current display at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, because circulation records, stored on microfiche, weren’t indexed.

Eventually, library officials determined that Oswald had checked out a book that was overdue at the time of his death: The Shark and the Sardines, by Juan José Arévalo.

The 1961 book, written by a former president of Guatemala, was a pointed denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. It’s been reprinted, but copies of the original editions are now a rarity.

Fifty years ago, this man helped give the world a window seat to the drama that unfolded after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

As a photographer for the Dallas Times Herald in November 1963 and the months that followed, Eamon Kennedy captured images that would encapsulate the city’s most tumultuous period, from the grieving face of a young girl as JFK’s death was announced to the maniacal visage of strip-club owner Jack Ruby at his trial for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.

A look at the Irish-born photographer’s most momentous years and memories, coming tomorrow in Monday’s Dallas Morning News.

Today’s Dallas Morning News carried news of the death of Kathey Atkinson, who as a 12-year-old became part of history when her photo appeared on the front page of the Dallas Times-Herald on Nov. 23, 1963.

Atkinson, her sister and mother had greeted President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie at Dallas Love Field, then later headed to Parkland Memorial Hospital when they heard radio reports of the shooting at Dealey Plaza. Times-Herald photographer Eamon Kennedy captured her grief just after the news of Kennedy’s death was delivered to the crowd outside, and the image would catapult the seventh-grader to international fame.

She left Dallas in 1991, but for those who might remember her and want to share memories, Atkinson’s family has created a Facebook page for that very purpose. You can find it here.

Nearly half a century ago, J. Waymon Rose was a reluctant front-seat observer to one of the most compelling criminal cases in U. S. history.

The traveling furniture salesman was picked as the tenth juror in the Jack Ruby trial. At the urging of his wife, he recorded his thoughts about what was happening in a spiral notebook.

The 50-page handwritten diary was donated to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in 2002. Three scrapbooks of newspaper and magazine clippings that his late wife kept also were recently donated to the Museum’s collection.

Rose will talk about the trial, his diary and his late wife’s scrapbook at 2 p.m. Saturday as part of the Museum’s 2013 Living History Series.

Lens, the New York Times blog about “photography, video and visual journalism,” has a fascinating story — with a Dallas twist — about Eddie Adams, the Associated Press photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for “Saigon Execution,” the iconic Vietnam War photo above. It shows Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the chief of the South Vietnamese national police, shooting a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem, in the temple.

Adam, who died in 2004, hated to talk about the photo or his Pulitzer. The reason, according to Donald R. Winslow, the author of the Lens piece, is that Adams thought he should have won the Pulitzer instead for the picture at right, taken five years earlier. It shows Jacqueline Kennedy holding the folded American flag that was presented to her at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral on Nov. 25, 1963.

The photo that did win that year was Bob Jackson’s unforgettable image (below) of Lee Harvey Oswald as he was shot while being transported through the basement of the Dallas police station the day before Kennedy’s funeral. Jackson, who worked for the Dallas Times Herald, captured the moment perfectly in what photographers call a “reflex” picture — you see something happening, and instinctively, before you can think about it, you push the shutter.

Adams had carefully planned and composed his photograph of the mourning Mrs. Kennedy, and it bothered him endlessly that the Pulitzer went to someone who got lucky with a reflex picture.

So when, five years later, he captured the assassination of a Vietnamese prisoner in what he knew was another reflex picture, he was never able to savor the accolades that came his way.

As Winslow writes:

“When the general raised his hand, Eddie raised his 35-millimeter camera to his face. In a pure reflex he released the shutter. He wasn’t certain of what he’d photographed until the film was developed …”

Furthermore, as Adams says in the video below (date unknown), he deeply regretted that the photo essentially ruined the military career — indeed, the life — of Gen. Loan. The general, he said, was just doing his job. “He shot him. He was a prisoner, and he shot him. I might have done the same thing.”